It is customary to imagine that what distinguishes an enslaved person is their legal status as human property. True as this is, it does not go far enough. For law in this regard merely expresses deeper social processes. To be an enslaved person, as we have seen, is to be socially dispossessed, to be humanly uprooted—indeed de-rooted, or deracinated. Foundational to slavery is the stripping away of kinship, the deprivation of communal belonging, the destruction of personal identity. Nothing so defines such destruction as the forcible disconnection of people from communities and kin. As Finley points out, of roughly sixty records of private sales of enslaved people in ancient Egypt, not one shows an enslaved adult male being sold with their wife or children.107 Not only were enslaved people “natally alienated,” as Patterson rightly points out—that is, dispossessed of kin relations dating from their birth—but their status also left them at permanent risk of losing whatever precarious bonds they might have forged with children and spouses.108 While slavery began in the calamity of capture, exile, and sale, the original trauma of social death might be repeated with every subsequent sale. It is illuminating in this regard that the literal translation of the Egyptian word for captive was “living death.”109 Of course, in many societies members of the community could be enslaved, too (not just foreigners), particularly those considered to have committed transgressions against their neighbors, including the “crime” of failure to pay back loans, whose result was frequently debt bondage of the debtor or one of their kin. Through such processes, an insider was effectively expelled from membership in their community, becoming an outsider, someone to whom others did not owe communal obligations—and thus someone who could be treated as a thing. In Egypt, as ’Abd al-Muhsin Bakir pointed out, insiders who were enslaved, usually due to their extreme poverty, acquired a status equivalent to legal and social death.110 One anthropologist of slave societies has remarked that characteristic of all forms of slavery is “the slave’s juridical inability to become ‘kin.’”111 Indeed, during the Late Period (first millennium BCE) in Egypt, enslaved people directly owned by the royal treasury were called nemeh, or “orphan.”112
Trade in enslaved people thus involved an intriguing symmetry. In most of the “primitive” societies we have studied, enslaved people were outsiders, and trade in these societies was undertaken with outsiders. Trade, slavery, and money were thus all connected in a circuit of alienation; they were constituted in relationships outside of and alien to the societies from which traders came. Slave trading was thus the exchange of (socially dead) outsiders with other outsiders to whom one owed no communal obligations. And money, as the means of conducting such trade, was a medium for these alienated social interactions. It should come as little surprise, then, that in many societies, enslaved people have also served as money, or at least as a measure of value. Given their frequent status as the primary items of trade, enslaved people readily became the item by which other goods were measured. We observe this sort of slave-money in a wide range of societies, including many in precolonial and colonial Africa, in the Pacific Northwest of what is now Canada, among the Obydo people of what is now Brazil, and, perhaps most famously, in early Christian Ireland.113
The Irish monetary system of the early Christian era pivoted on a dual metric. The most common measure of value was the sét, which referred to a head of cattle. Above that, the highest unit of value was the cumal, whose literal meaning is “female slave.” Fines for bodily injuries were often established in cumal, as were prices for land, even though typically no enslaved people changed hands in any of these purchases and sales. Just as enslaved people were abstracted from their communities—indeed one of the oldest Latin meanings of the verb abstract is “to separate or pull away”—so the cumal provided an abstract standard by which the value of other things could be measured. The violent abstraction inherent in slavery thus transformed enslaved-people-as-things into a generic measure of value, into a metric for expressing the value of one thing relative to another. Exchange value, as Marx demonstrated, is expressed in quantity, not quality. On the market, a thing represents an amount of money—not an amount of beauty, nourishment, warmth, et cetera. It is with money, in appropriate quantities, that we can buy the things of life. Money thus acquires the quality of being a measure-in-general (and ultimately of general exchangeability with all things). Its unique “quality” is to embody pure quantitativeness. Clearly, only those human beings who had been dispossessed of the qualities of personhood could serve as money, as measures of abstract quantity. Suggestively, enslaved people shared with coins the fact of being branded, of bearing signs imprinted on their surfaces. It is even said of the Samian prisoners of war captured by Athens in 439 BCE that they were branded with an owl, the very sign with which Athenian coins were marked.114 Enslaved people and coins, interchangeable in everyday life, shared the characteristic of being emblazoned with insignias of state power.
We see these social processes codified in Roman law, where ownership is defined as dominium (power or domination) over a res (a thing). It is significant that the word dominus originally meant “slave master,” not “owner.” But as the concept of absolute property was developed, dominus came to refer to one who owned anything that could be considered private property. Meanwhile, an enslaved person came to be a res in law, “the only human res,” as Patterson notes.115
But law here followed the social phenomenology of everyday life in slave society. After all, the same linguistic convention prevailed in Rome as in Greece, where enslaved people were frequently described as somata, particularly in documents of sale, and of manumission. Historian Keith Hopkins cites multiple texts in this idiom, including one specifying, “sold to Pythian Apollo, the female body whose name is Pistis” for “a price of four and a half mnae [450 drachmas],” as well as a manumission statement that described the freeing of “two female bodies whose names are Onasiphoron and Sotero.”116 Like work animals, enslaved people functioned as bodies that extended the corporeal reach and powers of the slave owner. For Aristotle, what enslaved people share with “tame animals” is that both “help with their bodies to supply our essential needs.”117 Referring to how Roman masters were transported by people they enslaved, Pliny the Elder remarked, “We walk with the feet of other people.”118 So identified were enslaved people with animal bodies that Athenian and Roman laws meant to protect buyers against unseen defects applied to the purchase of both animals and enslaved people.119 As the esteemed jurist Gaius observed, “The statute treats equally our slaves and our four-footed cattle which are kept in herds.”120 With such conflations of humans and beasts of burden in mind, Marx quipped that the slaveholder purchases an enslaved person “in the same way as he buys his horse.”121
Purchase, of course, was preceded by examination—often by inspection of enslaved people displayed on a platform, known as a catastra, of the sort to which Cicero alludes in his letter to Atticus. Roman law required that essential information about an enslaved person be hung on a label around their neck, and it was common practice for the potential buyer to poke, prod, and unclothe the enslaved in order to discern the qualities of the commodity on display. Undressing also operated as a crucial act of degradation, a way of stripping the enslaved of everything that made them social beings. Recounting his “day of slavery,” the great Odysseus tells Eumaeus, “They stripped from my back the shirt and cloak I wore, decked me out in a new suit of clothes, all rags, ripped and filthy” (Odyssey, 14:386–88). Enforced disrobing operated as an essential moment in the “secular excommunication” that rendered the enslaved culturally bare.122 The semiotics of nakedness functioned to negate personhood and the elements of social belonging defined by dress. By eliminating the individual’s social skin, masters were empowered to take control of the very identity of the bonded person. So naturalized was this mode of domination that even Seneca, who viewed enslaved people less inhumanely than many of his contemporaries, casually compared buying enslaved people to the purchase of a horse, recommending that the purchaser “pull off the garments from